An integrated circuit can include multiple data processor devices. A particular data processor device can include hardware components that can each perform different operations on data within the data processor device. Such hardware components can include one or more general-purpose instruction based data processor cores, e.g., as with a multicore processor, and one or more application specific components. For example, a particular data processor can use a specific hardware component to implement a security check, encryption/decryption, or the like, for handling the ingress of Ethernet traffic before routing the received data to an egress port of the data processor device.
Each hardware component of the integrated circuit can have different commands that need to be executed when handling network traffic. Thus, a processor within the data processor device that controls data flow through the data processor device may have to issue/assign separate commands in a particular order for each hardware component, in order to effectuate a sequence of data handling operations by the plurality of hardware components. As the number of components that perform operations on the data increases, the amount of overhead needed by a processor to coordinate handling of the data also increases, limiting a number of operations that can be executed in the data processor.